Conceived in 2005 by a Leadership Greenville class, Canine Corner turned a small, unused corner of Cleveland Park into a destination for dog lovers. / Staff

On many weekends, Ellis, then director of Greenville Parks and Recreation, would go for a looping walk, stop by the little dog park framed by trees and a creek and count the dogs, just to see. There would be 40-something dogs, normally, and twice as many people.

At less than half an acre, Canine Corner at Cleveland Park is still well-loved and remains the city’s only dog park. Although two others have since been built elsewhere in the county, they haven’t put a dent in the number of visitors who, on a clear, warm day, come to Canine Corner in droves.

Overcrowding has strained the dog park, drawing complaints from neighbors who live off Woodland Way. It’s noisy. Cars are illegally parked, posing a safety issue. Clashes happen on the other side of the fence as well. Visitors say too many dogs in a small space lead to fights and, sometimes, injuries.

With no room to expand, Greenville has looked at building a second, larger park, but in an urban setting where land is precious, it’s not easy for a parks department to devote square footage to dogs when there’s also a need for more athletic fields. For dog owners, however, the demand for a better space is just as important.

Problems afoot

Instead of the dog park, Jennifer Sigling takes her dogs to North Main Rotary Park, where they can run off-leash in a fenced-in baseball field.

Sigling, a volunteer with Upstate Therapy Dogs, says she avoids Canine Corner now after seeing too many fights break out, too many dogs that hadn’t been vaccinated, too many owners who didn’t pay attention.

“It’s just a bad experience for people who are really good canine citizens,” she says.

There also have been reports of dogs being dropped off at the park and fights that have sent pets to the animal hospital across the street. Sigling mentions a friend whose Labrador was attacked and had to get stitches.

The city gets frequent requests to create a separate area for large dogs, says Dana Souza, the current parks and recreation director, but Canine Corner is simply too small, built into a city park that already sees heavy traffic from other uses.

The idea to build the dog park was first conceived in 2005 by a Leadership Greenville class in which most of the members were dog owners themselves. Even then, a suitable spot was almost impossible to find, and the class settled on a quiet corner of Cleveland Park, where a couple of grills and picnic tables sat beneath shade trees.

A fund-raising effort began. Commemorative bricks were sold for $100 a piece. The city donated the land, and close to $28,000 was raised, most of it for fencing.

Mike Martinez, a class member and architect who helped design Canine Corner, says case studies of dog parks in other cities were examined before construction began. A number of groups were consulted, including the American Kennel Club and Upstate Forever and Friends of the Reedy River, who were concerned about storm water runoff.

A few neighbors wondered about parking, but the thought was that visitors could use the existing lots, Martinez says.

“We made a decision with the city to make the best use of what we had. Ultimately, we were taking a very prominent corner of the park that was currently underutilized and making it a destination,” he says.

At the time, no one really knew how much of a pent-up demand existed for dog parks.

They are now the fastest-growing segment of city parks, with 569 off-leash dog parks in the nation’s 100 largest cities in 2011, up from 353 in 2007, according to studies by the nonprofit Trust for Public Land.

A USA TODAY story that analyzed the data noted parks overall increased 3 percent in that time.

“The increase mirrors demographic shifts: There are now more households with dogs (43 million) than with children (38 million),” USA TODAY reported.

Dog parks have become social hubs for dogs and their owners, Souza says. Canine Corner “certainly adds to the dynamic and life of a park. Some would say positive, some would say negative, and me, I can see both sides of it.”

A new park?

The general rule for dog parks is they should be at least an acre, preferably the size of a football field, and grassed, says Ellis, now the planning director for Greenville County Recreation.

Ellis has learned a few lessons after building his last two dog parks in Taylors and Greer. The main thing is that they need to be in high-density areas where there is a built-in population to support a park, which makes locating available land even harder.

“What happens in our industry is if we’ve got enough land to build a soccer field, we’re going to build a soccer field because demand is so high,” Ellis says. “It’s the Catch-22.”

In the city, the most promising location for a second dog park is on Ridge Road, near the Wenwood Soccer Complex where the city owns more than 10 acres of land partly for, yes, future soccer fields.

The proposed 2013-14 capital budget has allocated $75,000 to build a dog park, but the money may be cut out or go to higher-priority projects as it has in years past.

“We’re coming out of an economic downtown, and the city budget has been very very tight so it’s not a time where we can just expand these areas,” Souza says.

And while dog parks are increasingly popular, it’s rare for a parks department to purchase land for one. They’re usually tacked onto an existing park or part of a master plan to build a new multi-purpose park, according to the Trust for Public Land.

Some cities have found alternative places for dogs to roam — on vacant lots, drainage detention sites, even former landfills that have been covered with topsoil and planted, the Trust for Public Land reported.

With so much redevelopment going on in Greenville, parcels like that don’t really turn up too often, Souza says, and the ones that do are too small.

Dog police

A dog park has always been part of the plan for the Greenville Humane Society’s new three-acre site on Airport Road. The only question is when.

Less than a year after moving in, the building is already at capacity, so any investment in the near future would have to be put into expanding specific services, says executive director Kim Pitman.

“We’ve tried to alleviate some of the strain on Cleveland Park by offering events here where you can bring your dog, but it’s not an everyday thing,” she says.

Yappy Hour, which started out with 25 young people who wanted a different kind of off-leash experience — think beer and live music — grew to a crowd of 250 in six months. After paying a small cover charge and signing a liability form, owners could let their dogs loose in a large courtyard.

Humane Society staff was on site to monitor behavior. Unvaccinated dogs weren’t allowed in and any aggressive dogs would be made to leave. Nothing of consequence happened, Pitman says.

“These are all responsible pet owners who are looking for outlets to be able to take their pet, come and have fun, and they’re willing to be responsible about it,” she says. “That’s the difference.”

Across town, policing Canine Corner is left up to its visitors. With two animal control officers for a city of 60,000, resources are already stretched, and since there isn’t a law that governs dog parks, officers can’t enforce the rules posted.

A section that dealt with dog parks was drafted a few years ago as part of an effort to update the city’s animal laws, but it was never passed, says animal control officer JoAnne Smythe.

In a “roundabout way,” Smythe can have owners remove fighting or biting dogs under a technicality that prohibits vicious or dangerous animals within city limits. She can’t prevent them from coming back to the park.

To really claim the title of a dog-friendly town, Greenville has to take a different, more fine-tuned approach to dog parks, Pitman says, then build more of them and come up with new outlets where “you can take your dog and enjoy life.”